I have a few other tidbits that I’ve been wanting to write about for the past couple of days, but let’s focus on the important stuff first.

Food.

Namely, honey oatmeal scones- perfect for this delicious autumn weather 🙂 Obviously, with the shift into fall, baking becomes mandatory for Gradissima ;p However, we just had a 4-day Halloween weekend, which means I’ve been on a stringent fat-bastard diet of sugar with a generous sprinkling of fats (and artificial colors, of course!).

I’m gradually weaning myself (gently…ever so gently) off the all-sugar diet, and today I managed a breakfast that seemed the perfect compromise: whole grain, seeded toast with chunky peanut butter…and a mug of hot chocolate. It was perfection.

Anyway, baking for today needed to include oatmeal and some wholesome goodness… and to smell good…and to taste good (not too “health food”-y) so that my Man and his buddies at work will enjoy them when I send half the batch with my aforementioned Man tomorrow. (Fat-bastard detox baking rule #1 mandates that at least half the baked product leave the house as soon as possible to prevent self-loathing as a result of face-stuffing. But you all know this.)

Ok. Yadda, yadda, yadda, I googled and shopped around my favorite sites and compared ingredients and settled on THIS recipe for Gradissima-style bastardization.

Whole Grain Maple Oatmeal Scones

We love our scones on weekend mornings! Occasionally I like to mix it up a bit from the traditional white flour cream scones, though. You may know by now that I sometimes fiddle with substituting white whole wheat flour into baked goods; I try to do the substitutions only when the flavors seem like they can take it — i.e. I wouldn’t use whole grain flour in a delicate, light lemon cake. Maple and oatmeal, though? They’re made for whole grain flour!

….

They look good, right? That’s an understatement. 🙂 Eggs on Sunday has lovely, 101 Cookbooks -style photography, so I’m not even bothering to get my camera to show you my scones. (They look pretty much the same as these, though my photography skills wouldn’t do them justice.)

I replaced the maple syrup in the recipe with the same amount of honey.

I added about 1/3 c of ground hazelnuts and 1/3 c of wheat bran (farelo de trigo) to the dry ingredients (before adding the butter)

my yogurt and milk mixture was one 125g container of fat-free yogurt and a splash of milk (as opposed to 1/3c yogurt, 1/3c milk)

That’s it! Mine are golden, smell like honey-heaven, buttery-toasty on the outside, and impressively moist and light on the inside. You know you have a good base recipe when your tweaking works! And this one is also very easy to tweak if you’d like to make it vegan 🙂 (Soy-based cream would substitute well for the yogurt-milk mixture, or you could use soymilk and soy yogurt… and margarine works instead of butter… etc.)

What’s better than taking something indulgent and changing it so you can rationalize less guilt?

Ok. Don’t answer that.

Whatever. The important thing is that I made Cinnamon Rolls in a quick, easy, less-fat-bastard way, and they totally hit the spot. The important thing is that I’m going to tell you my recipe 🙂

(There’s another important thing, too– recently, the culinary rockstars at Chow.com have had the same mindset….so I’ll link to their recipe for healthy-ish pancakes in a moment 🙂 )

(There will be no photos involved. The Cinnamon Rolls à la Gradissima were not long for this world, and the camera was not quick enough to record their fleeting, beautiful existence.)

Recipe: Cinnamon Rolls à la Gradissima

Ingredients:

1 cup regular self-rising flour

1 cup superfine self-rising flour

1/4 cup oatmeal/wheatgerm blend (I did a 3:1 proportion of oatmeal flakes and wheatgerm and threw it into the food processor to make a coarse powder)

2 tablespoons sugar (go raw, if you have it!)

1 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 cup fat free yoghurt

1/4 cup low-fat milk or light soymilk

Filling:

1 tablespoon ground hazelnuts

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons low-fat milk or light soymilk

1 cup raw or brown sugar

3 teaspoons cinnamon

Icing:

3/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon low-fat milk or light soymilk (add more for a thinner icing/glaze)

Make the filling first-

Combine hazelnuts, sugar, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Add olive oil and milk and mix until damp and crumbly. Set aside.

Make the dough-

Mix together the flour, oat/wheatgerm blend, sugar, and salt in a large bowl.

Stir in yogurt and milk to make a soft dough.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough (or use your hands) to make a large rectangle, about a quarter of an inch thick.

Here, you have two options. Option 1: spread half the filling on the bottom of a 8×8 pyrex and half the filling on the rolled-out-dough OR Option 2: spread all of the filling on the rolled-out-dough. Option 1 gives you a crispy, gooey surprise on the bottom of your rolls, but there’s no wrong way to spread the love here 😉

Roll up your rectangle of dough and goodness.

Slice into rolls. (About an inch thick is a safe bet, but if you want to make fewer thick rolls or more thin rolls, by all means, do it!)

Put your rolls into your 8×8 pyrex. I did 9 rolls and spaced them evenly. They grew to squish into each other in the oven quite nicely 🙂

The baking situation-

As you well know by now, I rock a gas oven with no temperature settings. It’s how I roll. I preheated the oven on medium/high and baked the rolls until they seemed done… not too dark, but just starting to get golden on top.

The icing-

Throw your sugar into a food processor and powder it. Throw the milk in and blend it. If it is too thick, add more milk. I like lots of thick icing, so this worked for me 😉

After the rolls are done, put healthy schmear of icing on each one. The heat will soften the icing and you can spread it more evenly.

Eat these babies hot.

AND THEN….

Here’s the Chow.com goodness I was talking about 🙂

Whole Wheat–Oat Pancakes Recipe

Just because you’re trying to be healthy doesn’t mean you should have to abandon all of your favorite foods, right? Here we doctor up pancakes by using whole-wheat flour and oats, for cakes that are still fluffy yet have a satisfying chewiness that’s actually good for you—sort of.

When I was young, these sugar cookies were a Christmas staple. But sometimes things you loved when you were a kid don’t live up to your adult standards. Well, this Betty Crocker classic has busted through the child-adult taste barrier. Make the kids roll these out, and then eat them yourself.

I want to try these for the simple pleasure of it. Mine will look nothing like them, of course, but hell, sugar cookies are just inherently good. And I’ll take any opportunity to legitimately slap icing on something 🙂

The rest of the photo gallery looks pretty fabulous as well… I want to try the Chocolate Crinkle cookies coated in powdered sugar. Mmmmmmm…..

Butter, sugar, eggs, salt, and flour—that’s the short ingredient list for these versatile sandy-textured sugar cookies. For simple round cookies, form the dough into a log, then slice it into rounds. For shaping with cookie cutters, roll out the dough to 1/8 inch thick and cut it into cool designs.

Game plan: The dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months.